From Batman to Step 11

Last Friday was a very busy and interesting day for InMotion. One thing we learned is that the new twitter logo is actually Batman, another thing we know now is why Renault F1 became world champion in 2006 and Ferrari didn’t. But more on that later in this, first an introduction to this blog and a small explanation about the what and why behind it.

So, a blog from InMotion, what can you expect from it? Short stories and experiences told by the team-members. For example stories about the development of the car, related technologies and of course the fun stuff in the team! We will try to give a little inside view in what it is to be part of a project like InMotion. Furthermore we will explain groundbreaking technologies and innovations in the area of motorsport in an understandable way.

It should be kind of clear from this point on what to expect from our blog. If not, you can always mail us! So, back to Batman!

"Why Batman?!", one might ask... Believe it or not, but it has come to our attention that the new logo recently announced by #Twitter is actually Batman (evidence in the following link, sorry but it’s only in Dutch, but you can check the images anyway: http://goo.gl/m8leh). This is of course not something we came up with ourselves. In this case our first meeting with Herman Couwenbergh (@Hermaniak) was the trigger. Luckily this was not the only positive thing we picked up from this meeting. Herman is an expert when it comes to social media, and this meeting was focused on the way InMotion will use these social media in order to reach you (and possibly other readers as well). We as InMotion really want to tell our story to the world. Herman asked us why we were not keeping a blog. Well, here it is! ;) 
                                                                                                                  

"And what about Step 11 then?", might the next question be. Since Herman was not the only person we met this Friday, we learned some more than only Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook. The meeting with the second person was special, really special. Especially for a team of highly driven students who dream of a job in the Formula 1 someday.

Meet Peter Wezenbeek. This guy was one of the four engineers (Control systems engineer) working on the car of Fernando Alonso, during his glory-period at the Renault F1 team. With this driver he took two consecutive world titles in the Formula 1. Was this because Alonso was so much better than Schumacher? Since Friday we believe that this is not entirely the case. It might also have to do with the control system in the car of Alonso, called Step 11 (http://goo.gl/V2ymz). This system was used by the Renault F1 team that year, while Ferrari still used the much older Step 10. That, and a lot more nice inside information, was the subject of the one hour meeting that we as InMotion had with Peter. Of course we also introduced him to our project, and luckily he was very enthusiastic! He offered to support us where possible and we exchanged some future ideas.

After this meeting it was time for us to head home and have a nice weekend. This gave us some time to come up with this first blogpost. We hope you’ve enjoyed reading it, and maybe also learned a thing or two from it. 

If you want to see more about InMotion, be sure to check out: http://inmotion.tue.nl